Sorry, I’ve been doing my finest impression of a headless chicken running around for the past few days. Monday was a workshop with a large travel company looking at what the world might look like in 2025. Today it was a big charity looking at the world in 2030 and the possible strategic implications thereof.
Did anything odd happen? Not really. With the charity societal values came up strongly as you might expect, along with digital communications accelerating protest and social change, the end of retirement (again), impacts of near universal mobile access to the Internet, mass migration, water, radical (extremist) religion and ‘crash of the cloud.’
With travel it was a bit more focused on things like energy, as you’d expect, although demographics was a fertile area for discussion.
What is really useful is that the future focus workshop process has now been done enough times to create a fantastic ideas bank of what other companies and organisations in other sectors and geographies feel are important areas of concern.
I was going to cover this in a blog post myself, so this won’t be quite as well structured…
Charities are one of the last industries to have survived the Internet destruction of the middle-man. Recruitment, travel and banking services are now able to go direct to the consumers rather than using middle men or agencies. However, we still use charities to assist those in need. They are charitable agencies. Why?
I think it’s because on the Internet we are currently focussed on company identification. Secure certificates on the Internet confirm the company you deal with are who they say they are. However those companies also want a guarantee of who the individuals are. eBay solves this problem with reputational ‘stars’. Other sites ask for passwords, which don’t confirm the person any more than me telling you by name is Bob.
Back to charities. What charities do is to qualify the recipients and look for donors. However, certainly by your 2030 timeframe, I’d expect the Internet to provide a mechanism whereby donors can meet the recipients and provide a direct donation – not just cash, but the actual item in need (e.g. a supermarket home delivery).
No need for charitable agencies in 2030, except perhaps for some of the overall marketing of the people in need.